Here's the latest for this week.

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Shabbat shalom,


Tzivia

A small Pesach adventure close to home

Are you still feeling holed up this Pesach???

I hope the past year has been okay for you and your family.

I hope you’re somewhere safe and healthy enjoying Pesach with a few more loved ones than perhaps you were with at this time last year.

After having every single plan cancelled for the last year-and-a-bit, we finally ventured out on an official Family Outing yesterday. I didn’t dare go too far afield, so we visited a local “national park” called Ein Afek (its official name is “The En Afek Nature Reserve”).

National parks in Israel are naturally smaller than the ones we’re used to from Canada, with a whole lot less nature. But the trade-off is that they are always pretty close to either home or other civilized parts, you can often get there by public transportation, and they also often offer a glimpse into some pretty interesting history.

Ein Afek has all three:

• It’s a ten-minute bus ride from our local mall, the Kiryon, probably a ten-minute drive from our house, if we were driving
• It has some cool nature bits, including some natural local wetlands
• It has some cool history bits, including both Biblical, Crusader, and British Mandate-era connections

I won’t pretend that this is Deep Nature, but at certain angles, it’s quite pretty and you do forget that you’re in the middle of the vast sprawling suburbs known as the Krayot, halfway between Haifa and Akko.